Natural Language

Last year the co-founder of a luxury interior design firm discovered that the Oxford English Dictionary defines nature as opposed to human beings and their creations. This led to the shocking discovery that dictionaries define words as they are generally used, and that general word usage tends towards the loose and changeable; as for instance when a native English speaker demands that human beings "return to [their] place in nature" while also insisting that "humans are part of nature" by definition. There followed a crusade to free people's minds from Cartesian dualism by artificially reviving a dictionary definition considered obsolete since 1873, whereupon "independent research" naturally revealed that the wider definition of nature, as the sum total of the physical world including human beings, was in fact still widely in use. The affair charmingly epitomises the respectable business response to the Anthropocene extinction event - call up a straw man and then drop a white elephant on him - and undeniably has the advantage of not landing anyone in jail or annoying anyone who matters.